


202. ripped at every edge

by piggy09



Series: The Sestre Daily Drabble Project [254]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-11
Updated: 2017-03-11
Packaged: 2018-10-02 14:43:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10220525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: “I can save you,” Helena whispers. She puts her fingers up lightly to the mesh of the cage, smears blood along the whirling of her fingertips. It feels right. “When you are in the cage, you will sweat out all your sin. It will all leave you. You will be light and empty and holy, and then you will understand, and then you can be free.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> [warning: abuse]

“She will come to our side,” Helena says to Tomas; her voice is trembling with how sure she is – or – how desperate she is to be sure, to be certain. She _will_ come to their side, this stranger with Helena’s face and a bump blooming on her forehead. Once she wakes up. Under the light of Maggie’s apartment she’d hesitated, she hadn’t shot Helena, and she’ll come to their side. She will.

Helena is weaving on her feet but she refuses to let her stab wound put her to sleep until Tomas says yes. He will. He knows she’s chosen, and she knows this stranger is special. God brought her to Helena. She can’t die.

The world gets eaten alive by black and she misses the beginning of Tomas’ sentence but it ends with “—on your head” so she thinks maybe he’s saying yes. It’s close enough.

Helena’s stranger’s eyelashes are fluttering in dreaming. Helena blacks out.

* * *

She wakes up to the sound of a fist hitting metal, over and over, methodically. Bang. (Pause.) Bang. (Pause.) Bang. Helena only knows the sound because she’s made it before; she understands the way the cage shakes. She rolls over. (Oh, her side. Oh her side.)

From the cage, her stranger watches her. Eyes angry and dark. She looks right at Helena. Bang-pause-bang. Her fist is bleeding on the mesh.

“Hello,” Helena whispers. Her throat is dry. She sits up, looks around for water. There’s a basin of it, stained pinkish with her blood. She drinks it anyways. Licks her lips. “Hello,” she says again, and now she sounds real.

“You’re disgusting,” is the response she gets.

“That’s not very nice,” Helena says. When she tips herself to the side she can fall off the table; she can crawl over to the cage this way, even though it pulls at the stitches in her side. “Hello again, not-Beth.”

“Helena,” the stranger whispers urgently, “you have to let me out. Okay?”

“I can save you,” Helena whispers back. She puts her fingers up lightly to the mesh, smears blood along the whirling of her fingertips. It feels right. “When you are in the cage, you will sweat out all your sin. It will all leave you. You will be light and empty and holy, and then you will understand, and then you can be free.”

“That what they did to you?” her stranger says. “Huh? That’s not – holy, Helena, that’s sick. Did they do that to you? Is that why you’re—”

Helena slams her hand against the cage and the stranger lurches back. The effort is too much, though: Helena curls to the floor, gasping like a wingless fish around the pain in her side. She opens her mouth to say something and then just groans.

“Helena _please_ ,” says the stranger, hands flat and bloody against the mesh. Her eyes are desperate. Helena’s vision is blurry but she’s beautiful, beautiful, and she’ll be even better after two or three days in the cage. One time Helena spent a week in there and when she emerged she was shining. This woman is already shining. The light on her hair. The light in her eyes. After a week she’ll be holier than Helena ever was.

Helena tries to tell her that but just groans again. The stranger is talking but Helena can’t hear it because she’s already

* * *

the others. You will tell me what I want to know, do you understand?”

“I’m not telling you _shit_. You can keep me locked up here however long you want, I’m not gonna turn into your twisted-up little Barbie doll over there. That how you get your kicks, you sick bastard? Breaking us and putting us back together

* * *

the sound of bodies crashing into metal sounds like:

* * *

wake up wake _up_ , Helena, _please_ , you need to get me out of here” and Helena is trying but waking is a sea of dark water and she’s drowning in it and the wound in her side is growing fingers and trying to reach inside of her and it can take them, all the pieces of her, every broken doll-bit, if

* * *

“Ow,” she says, and she’s awake. She rolls her head to the side. The stranger is slumped against the wall of the cage, bleeding and bruised. Her eyes drift in Helena’s direction and then keep going until they bump into the wall.

“Ow,” Helena says again, and lifts an arm to point at the cage.

“Yeah.” Her hair isn’t shining anymore. She looks tired. Helena can sit up, now, and she does. Her legs give out when she tries to put them to the floor so mostly she floats over to the cage. Then she collapses.

“It makes you stronger,” she says.

“I’m going to die down here,” says Helena’s mirror. “You understand that? You said I was different than the others but you’re killin’ me just like the rest of them.”

“No,” Helena says. “No. Not you.”

“Let me _go_ ,” she whispers. “Helena, your – handler, he thinks you’re a copy. He thinks I’m a copy. He’s gonna kill me once he gets the others out of me, he doesn’t give a shit about you.”

“No,” Helena says again. “You’re lying. You don’t remember things right, because the cage took them. But once you have food again you will know that we are—”

“You aren’t _listening_ ,” says the stranger, voice a fist to the face. “He _told me_ , when you were asleep. Said you were—”

(a simpleminded fool”)

“—an idiot, and you were serving a purpose, and he was gonna make an _example_ of—”

“Stop,” Helena says. “Stop, _please_.” She picks dried blood off the cage-mesh with her fingernails. It rusts down to the floor. “Shh. Shh shh. You have to wait, and then everything will be alright.”

“You know, right?” the stranger breathes, leaning close to the cage. Her face is so close. Her breath smells awful, like not eating, like your body eating your body to try and survive just one more day. “You can – you can feel it.”

Helena can.

Her silence is telling enough that the breath gets stronger, worse-smelling. Wisps of dark hair falling through the cage mesh. “Do you want to keep doing this?” says the coaxing whisper of Helena’s stranger. “Killing? Getting hurt? Getting locked up? Don’t you want to be something more than that?”

“I am the light,” Helena says, only when the words leave her mouth they’re just paper and then they’re gone.

“Come with me,” Helena’s stranger says. “There’s a whole – world out there. You can eat whenever you want. You don’t have to kill people to be loved. You know that? It’s possible?”

“I can’t let you out,” Helena whispers. “Tomas will be angry.”

“He’s gone,” (that same coaxing whisper) “he’s asleep. The keys are right there. You ever saved a life before, Helena? You ever done the right thing?”

Helena leans back more from the cage to study her, this stranger, Helena’s stranger. She is, really, Helena’s stranger now: brittle and dry and starving, fingerbones shaking, eyes wild. Helena sees her. Helena knows just the ways she’s hungry.

_Please,_ Helena says, _please, Tomas, let me out, I’ll be good._

_Please,_ almost-Helena says, _please, Helena, let me out, you’ll be good._

“You have to take me with you,” Helena says slowly. “You can’t leave me behind. If you leave me I will find you, and I will kill you.”

“Fine,” says Helena’s stranger, pressed desperate against the door to the cage. “Alright, fine, you can stay, it’s fine, god Helena _please_.”

Helena stands up on landsick legs that wobble. The stab wound in her side twists lonely fingers into every single part of her. This is the happy ending, she tells it. Either Helena gets this stranger or she gets to kill her; either way she wins.

She grabs the keys off the wall, and listens to them jingle. Either way she wins, she tells herself, and goes to open the cage.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed! :)


End file.
